Book-talk: exploring emotion and authority in Bhawaiya
On February 26th, the Department of English and Humanities (ENH) hosted a book talk on Dr Nasrin Khandoker’s (Postdoctoral Fellow, UCC) forthcoming Songs of Desire and Defiance: Subjectivity, Emotions, and Authenticity in Bhawaiya Folk Songs of North Bengal, set for release in July. The session was moderated by Sabiha Huq (Professor, ENH) and attended by Dr Nahid Afrose Kabir (Professor, ENH) and Dr Sowmit Chanda (Assistant Professor, GenEd), along with other faculty members and students.
Photo credit : Afra Ibnat Portia
The author shared that the underlying objective of the book comes from a reflective and autoethnographic exploration of female sexual subjectivity. As a Bangladeshi feminist and scholar of gender and cultural studies, she remarked that feminist theories often fail to capture the embodied emotions expressed in Bhawaiya tunes, which her book explores deeply. Affirming that the idea of “being-woman” is a fluid and subversive tool to negotiate with marginalised positions, she illustrated society’s quiet, sympathetic acceptance of the songs’ subtle explicitness through a personal encounter with a renowned singer from Koch Bihar, stating, “The female temporal subjectivity leaves an emotional residue in your body.” Sumaiya Tasnim (Lecturer, ENH), as a discussant, reflected on the cultural narrative of deviance and defiance drawn from the book’s framework, tracing the emotional lineage within Bengali traditions.
An interactive dialogue addressed some more dimensions of the book’s themes. One of the attendees, Saima Sanawar (Postgraduate, DU), articulated, “Bhawaiya presents women’s sorrow and desire not through a purely spiritual lens but on their own emotional terms and as a language of love, changing perspectives on ‘being-woman’.”
